Sorry if you follow me on instagram, facebook, etc., as I’ve posted the photos in this post on multiple places and I’m aware I’m spamming people with them. Still, I hope this is worthy spam. This first photo of me is taken by my mum, and I love it; I love the moment it captures, the way it represents a day spent with her.

Perth does blue like no other place on earth. Because of the way the strong light reflects at different angles, there are a million shades of blue to be found. Sometimes it doesn’t seem real.

“Yesterday I went to one of Western Australia’s beautiful beaches. Swimming there, a line by Camus – a man who loved beaches and sun – kept playing over and over in my mind. In the depths of that terrible winter, Camus wrote, I felt there lay within me an invincible summer. And bobbing out there with a teabag-bellied man, two Sikhs and some tattooed women, I felt how Camus’ line is what I feel when I read love stories.

Humankind survives and prospers through a paradox so terrible we generally refuse to acknowledge it: on the one hand as groups, we sanction and promote the most terrible crimes to benefit the group’s interest. Every day states and corporations do things which, were we to do them as individuals, would lead us to be sent to jail. Or, at the very least, to be despised as a human being without a shred of decency or goodness.

On the other, we jog along individually through acts of kindness and goodness. By and large, occasional acts of violence aside, we do not as individuals behave with each other as we do as groups. That is our saving grace. This paradox is also, I think, the hidden dynamic of love stories.

And perhaps it is because love stories point to the fundamental divide within us – between the mystic echoes of the individual soul, which craves freedom, and the dictates of community, which demand conformity to codes and practices we frequently find objectionable and sometimes profoundly wrong. In a sense this is a war that is waged in every human heart, and each human life makes its way through the rubble-strewn no man’s land that arises in our souls in consequence, trying to live as best we can.”

Love stories can be found in so many places, not all of them necessarily grand. I’m tired of the relentless cynicism that I see in our politics, our commentary, our media. But at the same time, I’m heartened by so many little things. So perhaps we really do function on a paradox.

: : The sweetness here is just too much (those little legs). [EDIT: Sorry, unless you follow this private instagram account, you probably won’t be able to see this. I completely forgot.]

: : Type in the hashtag #Lightthedark into twitter and restore your faith in humanity. And.

: : Next weekend, on Sunday 9 March from 11am to 2pm, Fremantle Markets is hosting a Kitten Play Pen, which you can enter with a gold coin donation, with the funds going to the Cat Haven. The idea is to increase adoption rates and raise much needed funds. Full disclaimer: I work on the marketing side of things for the markets, as a writer. I try not to plug things I’m paid for on this blog too much, but this is obviously a cause for which I have a very soft spot. Plus, playing with kittens does sound like an ideal way to spend a Sunday.